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Docs, where your notes can become knowledge through live collaboration.
Docs is an open-source collaborative editor that helps teams write, organize, and share knowledge together - in real time.
Docs is an open-source alternative to tools like Notion or Google Docs, focused on:
- Real-time collaboration
- Clean, structured documents
- Knowledge organization
- Data ownership & self-hosting
Built for public organizations, companies, and open communities.
- Rich-text & Markdown editing
- Slash commands & block system
- Beautiful formatting
- Offline editing
- Optional AI writing helpers (rewrite, summarize, translate, fix typos)
- Live cursors & presence
- Comments & sharing
- Granular access control
- Subpages & hierarchy
- Searchable content
- Simple structure, based on delimiter (
---) - Full screen option
- PDF exports
- Keyboard navigation
- Start presention from a block
- Presentation link
- Import to
.docxand.md - Export to
.docx,.odt,.pdf
Docs has optional AI features. They're model agnostic and gateway agnostic. You can either run your own or just use your AI provider. The config only requires an API key and a URL.
This version features a simple select and replace workflow. Your selection is the context and the instruction for the model. The AI feedback replaces your selection and is designed is optimized for Docs formatting.
This version uses BlockNote AI integration. It features:
- an AI toolbar at selection in which you can prompt, accept, reject and iterate AI feedback
- an AI cursor, which interacts with the document, just as another collaborator in your document
- document context is used on top of the selection
Docs comes with a resource server API and a server to server API which allows for awesome integrations.
A concrete example: Meet's transcriptions
If you're running a Meet instance, with simple config (DJANGO_SERVER_TO_SERVER_API_TOKENS) you can push your meeting transcript to Docs and give access to the user who requested it.
Experience Docs instantly - no installation required.
Docs supports Kubernetes, Docker Compose, and community-provided methods such as Nix and YunoHost.
Get started with self-hosting: Installation guide
Warning
Some advanced features (for example: Export as PDF) rely on XL packages from Blocknote.
These packages are licensed under GPL and are not MIT-compatible
You can run Docs without these packages by building with:
PUBLISH_AS_MIT=trueThis builds an image of Docs without non-MIT features.
More details can be found in environment variables
Run Docs locally for development and testing.
Warning
This setup is intended for development and testing only. It uses Minio as an S3-compatible storage backend, but any S3-compatible service can be used.
- Docker
- Docker Compose
- GNU Make
- Node.js with
npx, only to generate the agent skills withmake skills
Verify installation:
docker -v
docker compose versionIf you encounter permission errors, you may need to use
sudo, or add your user to thedockergroup.
The easiest way to start is using GNU Make:
make bootstrap FLUSH_ARGS='--no-input'This builds the app-dev and frontend-dev containers, installs dependencies, runs database migrations, and compiles translations.
It is recommended to run this command after pulling new code.
Start services:
make runDefault credentials (development only):
username: impress
password: impressAlternatively, you can start the project with the /docs-start agent skill.
The skills live in .agents/skills/, which Codex, Cursor and other agents read
directly. For Claude Code, run make skills once (and after each change to
them) to generate .claude/skills/. Other agents that need their own copy
can be targeted with make skills SKILLS_AGENT=<agent>.
It checks what is already built, stale or running, then runs only the Make
targets needed: make bootstrap on a first run, the rebuild of the images
whose dependencies changed after a pull, or just make run.
For frontend work, running outside Docker is often more convenient:
make frontend-development-install
make run-frontend-developmentStarting all services except the frontend container:
make run-backendmake frontend-test
make frontend-lintBackend tests can be run without docker. This is useful to configure PyCharm or VSCode to do it.
Removing docker for testing requires to overwrite some URL and port values that are different in and out of
Docker. env.d/development/common contains all variables, some of them having to be overwritten by those in
env.d/development/common.test.
Create a basic demo site:
make demoTo check all available Make rules:
make helpCreate a superuser:
make superuserAdmin UI: http://localhost:8071/admin
This project is community-driven and PRs are welcome.
Curious where Docs is headed?
Explore upcoming features, priorities and long-term direction on our public roadmap.
This work is released under the MIT License (see LICENSE).
While Docs is a public-driven initiative, our license choice is an invitation for private sector actors to use, sell and contribute to the project.
Docs is built on top of Django Rest Framework, Next.js, ProseMirror, BlockNote.js, yhub, and Yjs. We thank the contributors of all these projects for their awesome work!
We are proud sponsors of BlockNotejs and Yjs.
Docs is the result of a joint initiative led by the French 🇫🇷 (DINUM) Government and German 🇩🇪 government (ZenDiS).
We are always looking for new public partners (we are currently onboarding the Netherlands 🇳🇱), feel free to contact us if you are interested in using or contributing to Docs.